When the US President asked where the monument removal would end and if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next, he certainly spoke for many Americans who ask the same question, possibly the majority of Americans. For them the Confederate monuments in many cities are just decoration which one passes daily like so many flowerpots. White Americans are still the majority in most States and they are quite comfortable without poking around in what seems a distant history. But this view lacks a deeper understanding and empathy, i.e. the ability to put oneself in somebody else shoes. It lacks the basic insight that for African Americans these same Confederate monuments are a thumb in the eye every time they see them as well as for everyone else who is glad that the Civil War ended with a Union victory. An op-ed of the LA Times written on occasion of the New Orleans monuments expresses this point:
They are ideological symbols meant to assert power over our public spaces, a fact that became palpable during a contentious City Council debate on the removal plan. When a gray-haired preservationist in a bow tie stood up and gave the finger to removal advocates, I understood that those statues, just part of our landscape, high up on plinths and columns, have been giving the finger to the majority of New Orleanians for generations. Giving the finger to the people who create our vibrant culture and drive our economy, to our celebratory and joyful customs, to the true heart of a diverse, if sometimes fractious port city. To our past and our future.
For those fellow Americans the monuments are not just decoration but they have a meaning and purpose which all artistic beauty cannot conceal. For them the heroes of the Confederacy are an ongoing justification of the injustices they had to endure as a minority, solely based on their skin color and ethnic background. Everybody knows, that discrimination based on skin color is unfortunately not a distant past and is still relevant in 2017. Or they are a reminder how confederate secession attempts were treason on the original idea of the American Revolution.
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The double horse Jackson-Lee statue is loaded on a flatbed truck Tuesday night. |
In 1967, 22 years after the end of WWII, many, if not most, Germans lived pretty comfortably in their post-war
Wirtschaftswunder and saw little reason to poke around in questions of German guilt. It was the year when Alexander Mitscherlich wrote the book "
The Inability to Mourn", a book in which the psychoanalyst took psychoanalysis from the level of an individual and transferred it to a nation which he diagnosed to be in some kind of paralysis when it came to digesting the enormity of their past.
Creating systems of denial and forgetting, the Germans chose not to deal with the past. As a result the German psyche never freed itself from Hitler because it did not go through the rituals that true withdrawal demanded. (A review of the Inability to Mourn)
As having become a young adult in that period in Germany I remember how this book along with the revolt of my generation staged in the streets of Paris, Rome and Berlin broke open this inability of G...
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